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It is at home that I feel in exile. This means that I feel alienated from the spirit of the time, and above all from a dominant ideology, based on mercantile values and whose essential purpose is to legitimize the planetary influence of the logic of Capital.
We can add the rise of ignorance and the expansion of ugliness, the ruling class's contempt for the people (and peoples), the triumph of immature narcissism, and many more.
But this does not mean that I am a «restorationist»: I rarely sing the air of «before it was better». On the contrary, I think that nostalgia can also be revolutionary. #Benoist
Historically, the philosophy of the Enlightenment first of all attacked organic communities, whose way of life they denounced as ridden with irrational “superstitions” and “prejudices,” in order to replace them with a society of individuals.
The central idea was that the individual exists not on the basis of belonging but independently of it, an abstract vision of an “unencumbered self” anterior to its ends, which also constituted the basis of the ideology of the rights of man.
Born by a secular version of the ideology of Sameness, thus was constituted the modern theory which defines humanity as uprootedness or release from all tradition. #Benoist
Thread: Ihr habt ja vlt. von der #Gegenuni gehört, die der Faschist Martin #Sellner verg. Juli online eröffnet hat. In einem ihrer „Seminare“ habe ich eine aufschlussreiche Beobachtung gemacht, die verstehen hilft, warum es in diesem Milieu so große Sympathien für #China gibt. /1
Mr Tiger reminds us that men, when compared to women, are simultaneously more rational and unreasonable. Men are perfectly aware of the fact that they often embark on hopeless adventures and take on foolish challenges but feel that they must never suffer a ‘loss of face’.
This notion of useless sacrifice stems directly from an ethic of honour. Women, on the other hand, see things differently and reproach men for giving in to ‘pride’. They accuse men of chasing after ‘pipe-dreams’ and neglecting their familial responsibilities.
In their eyes, one does not lose face when being ‘reasonable’.
At the end of the day, men remain eternally childlike. . . . the child that subsists in every accomplished man as a living memory of a past that is ever destined to inspire the future. #Benoist
At the end of the day, men remain eternally childlike. . . . the child that subsists in every accomplished man as a living memory of a past that is ever destined to inspire the future. #Benoist
Through clubs and ‘secret societies’, says Mr Lionel Tiger, ‘men court other men’. Major professional brotherhoods, student corporations, orders, and secret societies constitute an array of different means that allow males to reinforce (and exalt) their mutual bonding.
Whether in college or the army, ‘initiation ceremonies’, which are often bizarre and even cruel, allude to the rites of passage from puberty to adulthood (and impose the following transposition:
one only becomes ‘adult’ when one possesses knowledge or power), strengthening the bonds between the ‘initiates’. Women’s clubs, by contrast, regularly sink into disorder and gossiping. #Benoist
The international law issued by the Peace of Westphalia 1648 is today equally turned upside down by the ideology of human rights, which justifies the right (or the duty) of ‘humanitarian interference’, i.e. preventive war, formerly seen as nearly identical to a war of aggression.
2/ This right of humanitarian interference, which patently violates the Charter of the United Nations, has no precedent in international law. It suggests that every state, whatever it be, can intervene at will in the internal affairs of another state, whatever it be,
3/ under the pretext of preventing ‘attacks on human rights’. Justifying politico-military intervention, which decolonisation had theoretically put to an end, it permits a group of countries or authorities professing to act in the name of a nebulous ‘international community’
American universalism proves to be incompatible with the existence of cultures and styles that differ from it. It is no coincidence that the spreading of the American way of life has gone hand in hand with the reduction of the differences between countries and peoples.
Americans are irresistibly driven to impose their own model and absorb all the qualitative differences that stem from our world’s diversity into their own quantitative civilisation. They are doomed to cause the decline of every culture they touch and to uproot all traditions.
By exporting their way of life, they invariably obliterate the very spirit of peoples, because their own existence derives from such an act. #Benoist
1/ Capitalism is not primarily an economic system, but a “total social fact” (Marcel Mauss), from which flows the fetishised form that social relations take in liberal societies. It is therefore futile to seek to assess its value with regard to its real or supposed effectiveness.
2/ The capitalist system is undoubtedly highly efficient at producing commodities, but efficiency is not an end in itself. It never qualifies that the means implemented to achieve an end, without telling us anything of the value of this end. Goods bring in money,
3/ which allows us to produce more goods, which in turn create more money. The surplus value thus released allows the transformation of money into capital, and the over-accumulation of capital allows money to perpetually increase itself.
1/ On the psychological level, individuals now feel dispossessed by overwhelming mechanisms, an increasingly fast pace and even heavier constraints—variables so numerous that they are no longer able to grasp where they stand.
2/ That this happens at a time when individuals are lonelier than ever, abandoned to themselves, when all great world-views have caved in, only intensifies this feeling of a nothingness. “Globalization,” says Laïdi, “strangely reproduces the Freudian mechanism of the crowd
3/ in the grips of infection and panic: infection, to the extent that globalization engenders conformity and uniformity; panic because everyone feels alone, faced with mechanisms beyond their understanding.” Accordingly, globalization resembles a puzzle of splintered images.
In the society of individuals, the dominant opinion is that there is nothing worse than death (especially since for most of our contemporaries there is nothing afterwards). This opinion is characteristic of all times of decay,
while at other times it is believed that servitude or dishonor are worse than death and that certain causes deserve to be given life for them. Today we are very concerned with the extension of life expectancy, that is, its simple duration; its content is much less worrying.
As the excellent Byung-Chul Han says: “The search for the good life has given way to the hysteria of survival”. Those who most want to survive are also those who have never lived. This is what happens with the “civilizational” aspect. #Benoist
1/ Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is not longer any discernible meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation
2/ of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious
3/ of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices. Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected.
In 1973, shortly before his death, French President Georges Pompidou confessed to opening the gates to immigration at the request of many leading businessmen, such as Francis Bouygues, who was eager to take advantage of an obedient and cheap labor,
devoid of class consciousness and all traditions. social competition. This movement was made to put pressure from below on the wages of French workers, to reduce their enthusiasm for protest and, in addition, to weaken the unity of the labor movement.
The big bosses, he said, "always want more." 40 years later, nothing has changed. #Benoist
The end of the world has indeed happened. It did not happen on a specific day, but stretched over several decades. The world that disappeared was the world where most children knew how to read and write. A world where heroes were worshiped instead of victims.
A world where you could understand what Pascal meant when he wrote that entertainment prevents us from living a real human life. A world where borders protected those who lived their own lives and in their own way. Yes, that world had its flaws and was sometimes terrible,
but the daily life of great masses of people was at least regulated by the order of meanings given by border posts. Through memories, it was a world still familiar to many of us. Some people regret its passing. But this world will never come back. #Benoist 2013
For me, the matter is obvious, the main enemy is liberalism. I was already convinced of this during the existence of Soviet communism, which was ultimately state capitalism,
& I think the same today, at a time when liberal ideology became something of a global dominant ideology, whose three pillars are capitalism, the religion of human rights and market society. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck stated in 1922 that liberalism was the death of nations.
For today, the priority is to overthrow the ruling classes that have isolated themselves from the nation, destabilize the establishment serving banks and financial markets. All means are good for achieving this. #Benoist
1/ As opposed to the centralising tradition, which confiscates all powers to establish a single level of control, as opposed to a bureaucratic and technocratic Europe, which relinquishes sovereignty without transferring it to a higher level;
2/ as opposed to a Eur. which will only be a big market unified by free trade; as opposed to a ‘Eur. of Nations’, a mere assemblage of national egos which can't prevent future wars; as opposed to a ‘European Nation’ which's nothing more than a larger version of the Jacobin state;
3/ as opposed to all of the above, Europe (Western, Central, and Eastern) must reorganise itself from the bottom up, in close continental association with Russia. The existing states must federalise themselves from within, in order to better federalise with each other.
Today the discussion of human rights does not just have as its goal the supply of a substitute ideology after the collapse of the ‘grand narratives’. By seeking to impose a particular moral norm on all peoples,
it aims at giving the West a good conscience once again by allowing it to install itself once more as a model and to denounce as ‘barbarian’ those who refuse this model. In history ‘rights’ have only too often been that which the masters of the dominant ideology had decided
to define in this way. Associated with the expansion of markets, the discussion of human rights constitutes the ideological armour of globalisation. It is above all an instrument of domination, and should be regarded as such. #Benoist
1/ Freedom is not only a personal power. It needs a social field to exercise itself. That is why one could not be satisfied with the definition figuring in Article 4 of the Declaration of Rights of 1789: ‘Freedom consists in being able to do anything which does not harm others’.
2/ On the one hand, individual autonomy & the free expression of capacities & merits are not subjective rights but correspond, on the contrary, to an imperious political & social necessity. (Public education, for example, is not at all the result of some ‘right to education’
3/ without which it would be free, but optional. What makes it obligatory is the recognition that instruction constitutes a social good.) On the other hand, individual freedom is never accomplished in a society that is not free,
1/ The first theoreticians of human rights were not wrong to refer to human nature. But it is the notion that they formed of it that was inconsistent. One knows today—one has known it for a long time—that man is a social being,
2/ that the existence of men did not precede their coexistence; in short, that society is the perspective in which, from its origins, the human presence in the world has been recorded. Just as there is no spirit that is not incarnated,
3/ there is no individual that is not situated in a determined socio-historical context. Membership in humanity is thus never immediate, but mediated: one belongs to it only through the intermediary of a particular collectivity or a given culture.
1/ From the Right, apart from individual developments, there is obviously nothing to expect. If today it has not moved entirely to the side of money, at least it does not stop maintaining a scarcely artistic blurriness around the omnipresent reality of capital.
2/ In this way, the customary reluctance it feels with regard to society is added to a complete incomprehension of the historical period in which we live. Except in some small circles, the Right has abandoned what in the past could have constituted its legitimacy:
3/ its fidelity to the ethic of honour, charity, and disinterestedness. The Right has come to possess and thereby it has been dispossessed. It has stopped reading Sorel and Proudhon. It prefers the predators of the CAC 40 to Bernanos and Péguy.
1. Modernity is characterised primarily by five converging processes: individualisation, through the destruction of old forms of communal life; massification, through the adoption of standardised behaviour and lifestyles; desacralisation, through the displacement of the great
2. religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world; rationalisation, through the domination of instrumental reason, the free market, & technical efficiency; & universalisation, through a planetary extension of a model of society postulated implicitly as the only
3. rational possibility & thus as superior. This movement has old roots. In most respects, it represents a secularisation of ideas & perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics, which spread into secular life following a rejection of any transcendent dimension.
1/ The tendency to overexpansion & concentration produces isolated individs. who are thus more vulnerable & defenceless. Widespread exclusion & social uncertainty are the logical consequences of this system which has wiped out almost all possibilities of reciprocity & solidarity.
2/ Faced with traditional, vertical pyramids of domination that inspire no confidence, faced with bureaucracies that are reaching more and more rapidly their level of incompetence, we enter a world of all sorts of cooperative networks.
3/ The former tension between a homogeneous civil society & a monopolistic Welfare State has, little by little, been reduced by the existence today of a whole web of organisations supportive of deliberative & well-functioning communities which are forming at every level of social
1/ In contrast to racism, there is a universalist and a differentialist anti-racism. The former leads to the same conclusions as does the racism it denounces. As opposed to differences as is racism, universalist anti-racism only acknowledges in peoples their common belonging to
2/ a particular species and it tends to consider their specific identities as transitory or of secondary importance. By reducing the ‘Other’ to the ‘Same’ through a strictly assimilationist perspective, universalist anti-racism is, by definition, incapable of recognising
3/ or respecting otherness for what it is. Differentialist anti-racism, to which the New Right subscribes holds that the irreducible plurality of the human species constitutes a veritable treasure. Differentialist anti-racism makes every effort to restore an affirmative meaning
